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Although it's had a foot in the UK market through its eMachines brand, the Gateway name has fallen off the radar since its disappearance in 2001. It's now making a comeback with the 8550GB notebook as part of a brand new range.
The first noticeable feature is the whopping 17.1in display. With a glossy coating, it serves particularly well when watching movies, although it's not as impressive as Sony's X-Black displays.
Of course, a large screen results in an even larger chassis. That said, Gateway has kept it pretty thin at just 35mm.
Beating away at the heart of the system is a 1.73GHzPentium M processor, which is provided with 1Gb of memory. Powered by an ATI Mobility Radeon X700, the 8550GB is quite good when it comes to 3D gaming too.
Our lab tests returned scores to suggest that you'll be able to run most games as long as you stick to low detail settings, and this notebook will perform well in most Windows tasks.
Gateway has also supplied a 100Gb hard disk, which is a good size for a notebook computer. If you find yourself running out of space, the double-layer recordable DVD drive will happily archive 8.5Gb of data.
Should you have a digital camera, a card reader at the front of the notebook will speed up photo downloads and accepts five types of common memory card formats.
At 3.5kg, it's unlikely you'll be taking this notebook on holiday, but the battery life is there to facilitate it. In our test, the 8550GB ran for just over four hours. If watching DVDs, you can expect it to last just under two and a half hours.
The software bundle consists of Microsoft Works 8.0, Cyberlink PowerDVD and Nero 6 Suite. McAfee VirusScan is also included, but being just a 90-day trial, it is simply there to get you to purchase a full licence.
See also:
A solid notebook with a fast processor and lots of memory but not much in the way of software 01 Nov 2005
All Notebooks & Tablets PCs
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